“Question: How does an unemployed medical student afford $20,000 in weapons gear?”
Just like millions of other students- credit cards or maybe even identity theft.
Let’s go through it again:
First, Holmes was not an “unemployed medical student”. He was a doctoral student in neuroscience who dropped out at the end of last semester. Unlike med students who take out loans for their whole education, Ph.D. students in the sciences generally get full-ride plus stipend fellowships. It also seems Holmes also got a grant from the NIH (via some sort of program that gave money to his university to make grants to doctoral students). Graduate students can also take out student loans, and in amounts larger than undergraduates. He could easily have had a fair bit of spare money without using either fraud or consumer credit.
Second, the $20K figure was made up by some blogger seemingly out of thin air. Critics in the comments to the blog post suggested that a really good bargain hunter could have acquired Holmes’ kit for $2K, I priced it out to $5K, other FReepers suggest $7500 tops.